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When I was a child I used to help my mother by filling and carrying the
coal bucket from the garage to the kitchen. I enjoyed the sight, smell and feel
of the black and shiny lumps, and I liked to watch it burning, red and hot,
through the grating in the stove. Sometimes I noticed the pattern of wood grains
in the coal and it was then that I realised, for the first time in my life, that
coal was made from wood – or more accurately, coal was wood, though
modified by some process I did not understand.
I had no idea how wood turned into coal, or how it got to be
buried under the ground, but with a little more thought I have come to realise
several important things.
Before I elaborate, I would like to describe a coalmine. To be specific,
the Latrobe Valley coal deposit, in southeast Australia. This mine is roughly
shaped like a diamond, 300 km long and 300 miles wide at its widest point. Some
of the deposit goes under the sea, and is thought to be up to 5 km thick. This
is truly a vast amount of coal!
The structure of the Latrobe coal deposit is interesting too. It is made
largely of very fine plant debris interleaved with layers of ash and pollen-rich
layers. It also contains made uprooted trees, buried at all sorts of angles.
When I was at school, the only teaching I had on coal and how it formed
went this way : Coal is formed very slowly over tens of thousands of years, as a
forest drops its leaves in the watery swamp around its roots. As the peat bog or
swamp, which is on a floodplain near the coast, collects its layers of
vegetation it slowly sinks, and eventually the peat changes into coal.
Eventually the ocean rolls in and buries the swamp, until humans come along to
dig it up again.
If this typical school teaching is true, we ought to find soil and roots
under the coal, along the base of the deposit, but at Latrobe the coal stops
dead at a layer of clay. This clay (called kaolin) is so pure it could be used
for high-class pottery. The fact that the coal stops at the clay indicates that
the coal was actually dropped on top of the clay, rather than grew on it.
Another problem is the layers of ash. If this ash had been dropped on a
swamp or bog the layer would not be so clear-cut. Roots and water, seasons and
time would have destroyed it. So it looks like the coal was laid down quickly,
followed by further layers of ash, then more coal (or wood and plant material),
before decomposition could dissolve or disrupt it.
Another problem is the fact that the type of plants found in the Latrobe
coal are mostly not suited to growing in swamps. The Northfolk Island Pine, the
Kauri Pine, the Huon Pine, The Celery-top Pine, the Brown Pine, the Banksia and
the native NZ Pine usually prefer well-drained soils. How was it then that trees
which normally do not grow in swamps are found in a huge deposit which (it is
said) is the result of a swamp? It seems more likely that trees once growing on
higher slopes were suddenly uprooted and dropped in layers across a huge stretch
of land.
And what are we to think of the thickness of the coal? The school
teaching about a slowly-sinking area of swamp really asks too much. Nowhere on
earth today do we find swamps 300 miles long and wide slowly sinking, evenly,
and populated by dry-soil plants, forming coal to a depth of 5 km. What bogs we
do have are usually very small, and there is no sign of any coal in them.
I was also taught at school that coal takes millions of years to form,
yet recent experiments have produced coal from wood in only a matter of hours.
All it takes is a bit of heat and pressure and wood turns black and shiny.
Obviously coal does not need immense time-spans to form.
As a Christian, I find the most satisfying explanation for the presence
of coal in the simple narration of the Bible. In Genesis 7 and 8 we are told of
a world-wide flood which covered all land for about one year. A force this
powerful would explain the formation of the global phenomenon of sedimentary
rocks containing billions of fossils. It would also explain the huge Latrobe
coal mine and other similar deposits, containing billions of tons of plant
material, swept into enormous heaps and covered by sediment.
If it was not a world-wide flood which formed the Latrobe deposit, I
would like to know what other force could have done it.
So while I was busy carrying the coal for my mother, I was actually holding some very important evidence supporting the early chapters of the Bible. There must be some sort of irony in all this. It seems that our present world is using the remains of the former world to cook its meals and drive its power-stations!